Is this official?
No, these builds are not officially supported by GNU, The reason is that GNU cannot guarentee the integrity of the source. Also GNU does not distribute Icecat binaries.
Official Support
You can find support via the Icecat GNU website, where are available several ways of contacting people involved in the project including IRC and mailing lists. You should use these channels for feature requests and anything that suggests changes in the source code.
Support for this website and Icecat builds
As you can guess, I cannot change Icecat source code on my initiative, otherwise it wouldn't be Icecat. For this reason you should write me only about these particular builds or to request a new build for some operating system. Of course I'm also open to discussions so feel free to write me about a specific topic to discuss like "Surveillance Capitalism". In other words if you want to propose to remove or add some features you should use the official GNU channels above, instead if you want to report a problem with the binaries distributed via this website, then you should contact me by using either the form in this page or the email address in the bottom of each page of this site, using, if possible, my public key to encrypt the email.
Why isn't this project on Github?
Because github belongs to Microsoft and I believe that Microsoft and Ethics are two different planets. Though you can find icecat in winget-pkg project on github. Instead I prefer to use Codeberg
Why this project is intrinsically unsustainable
Icecat is not a real fork in the sense of the term. Forking means that in a specific
point in time the codebase was copied, modified and kept being worked on in a different
branch or repository, with a different product name as well.
Icecat instead tries to apply changes in the source code of Firefox at every new release
of the latter.
This allows Icecat to run the latest code from Mozilla, which is good, but at the same
time it will always depend on the latest version of Firefox-ESR and, if Mozilla shuts
Firefox down, Icecat will disappear.
To put it in a different (paradoxal) perspective: if everybody drops Firefox in favor of
Icecat, Mozilla will go bankrupt, Firefox will cease to exist and so will Icecat.
So why do I keep working on this? Because at the moment I cannot find a browser out
there that seems to make the interest of the users, I've been running tests on many of
them and all of them phone home or worse. Also forking to a fresh new browser and
keeping up with development is no easy task, Firefox codebase is huge to say the least,
and for the moment, this sort of circular tradeoff is acceptable to me... In the end
this browser is what I believe is best for all of us, on a social level, and it can
improve everyone's experience. I started by building it for myself, then I decided to
share my work with others and then I decided to triple that work by adding more
operating system to the target platforms.